1.1 Set Up Domain and Host

The first step to take in building your drop ship website is to choose a domain name and set up an approved host. I’ll show you exactly how to do that now. Click on the video below to be guided through step by step.

Click Here To Start

Today I’ll walk through step by step with helping you set up the foundation system for your drop ship website.

At this point you’re not ready to add products or anything else. You are simply going to learn how to set up the basic framework system of your drop ship site so you can work toward the goals of getting accepted with suppliers and customizing the site later when you choose to officially launch. The three major reason why it is important to set up the basics of your drop ship website system right now are:

  1. to prove you are serious about building a drop ship business.
  2. to secure your own website URL-domain name to share with your specific suppliers when you apply to work with them. Most suppliers worth doing business with will not work with you unless you have at least the basics of your website set up.
  3. to have a site that you can customize in more detail in preparation for your official launch day.

Don’t worry if you’re not too technical in setting up a website because in this day and age setting up a website is pretty simple. You don’t need to be a programmer to have a solid website system.

Now, you could literally spend days researching all the pros and cons of hundreds of ecommerce systems out there. So to help you sift through all that I will simply share with you the system I use for my self as well as for thousands of other drop shippers I’ve helped. I will then guide you through setting it up for yourself in the next 10 minutes.

The best system to set up, especially for newbies starting a drop ship business, is to use Wordpress on Bluehost. Here are 4 major reasons:

  1. It’s very fast and easy to set up, affordable and flexible. You can literally build any time of site using WordPress. So if you change your mind down the road about building a drop ship business you don’t have to spend any more time or money finding another host or system because you will already have a solid drop ship host and a flexible website system called WordPress.
  2. You will have 100% control over your site. Many systems don’t give you that type of control but WordPress does because you are self-hosting it on your own account at Bluehost.
  3. You can set up unlimited ecommerce stores. That’s right, there is no further cost at all to set up more sites with Bluehost. Other 3rd party ecommerce platforms charge lots of money to have more sites.
  4. WordPress is used by millions of people across the globe and powers over 25% of all the websites in the entire world!
5 Comments
Collapse Comments

Well, I must disagree with the Bluehost thing, because them and many others are not really transparent about their offers.

I’m saying this because I’ve been doing extensive research and most of them offer a shared hosting where you can use a private SSL certificate (a must-have these days!) for just ONLY ONE website. Otherwise, you must have a VPS hosting where costs go even higher.

Not to mention the cost of the SSL itself, which they offer only for the 1st year and nobody talks clearly about using free SSL private certificates such as Let’s Encrypt.

Of course, I’m not saying that Bluehost, Dreamhost and others are bad. I’m just warning that their offers are confuse and full of small letters that gives us, newbies, some headache.

Alright, in the beginning it’s obvious that we can’t take care of more than one or two webshops, but I don’t know, I feel that there are better offers than Bluehost.

I’m studying MochaHost offers and they seem to be better, although not very known…

Dear Trent, I think you could do an update and shed more light on this other than just referring to Bluehost.

Here in my country, Bluehost does not offer the same as in the US and I’d to cancel my subscription in the same day, but then I already had a paid domain which I could not cancel (I did all this before finding your courses), so now, even if I get to use US Bluehost services, I”ll be stuck for awhile with Bluehost in my country just for domain management.

Trent (Administrator) April 13, 2017 at 8:40 pm

Hi Rafael,

Thanks for your comment. I’m sure Bluehost and others could definitely do a better job with being more clear with the many features they offer. Bluehost does in fact offer FREE SSL for Multiple WordPress sites on the same shared hosting environment. This is a recently new development for Bluehost as of January of 2017. Normally SSL’s cost at least $50 per year per SSL, but with Bluehost you can have multiple SSL’s for FREE for all of your WordPress sites! That makes Bluehost in my experience stand out from the rest. I can’t say what their foreign relations are and how they do business abroad though.
All the best,
Trent

Thank you for the straight-to-the-point approach. I have the confidence to go ahead and build my first website now.

Trent (Administrator) January 12, 2018 at 7:03 am

Nice to hear Ikobayo! Thanks

WordPress is a good option, I am currently working with it and most everything is customizable. If you want your shop or shops to be your own with your own unique style or styles I would say WordPress is a nice option.

If you want a site where everything is mostly done for you but your kinda stuck with what they give you but it’s really good use Shopify be prepared tho to pay a monthly fee.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *